Mary Leone, youngest of seven children of John Ellsworth and Marie Antoinette Daze’ Nichols, was born December 28, 1923, in Flagstaff, Ariz. Mary Leone’s formal education began in 1929 in the public schools at Kearns Canyon and Chir Lee, Ariz. Due to her father’s employment with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the family lived on or near the Navajo and the Hopi Indian Reservations where Mary Leone attended government schools. She was, most always, the only white child in her class as the picture of her First Communion class confirms. By the time Mary Leone was ready for high school, the family had moved to the Navajo Reservation in southwest New Mexico, close enough for her to enroll in Sacred Heart Academy at Waterflow. She fell in love with the Ursuline Sisters, and with the boarders in the Academy, especially with Anglo girls like herself. After graduation, she came to Kentucky and enrolled at the Mount Saint Joseph Junior College.
On September 8, 1942, Mary Leone returned to Mount Saint Joseph to enter the novitiate. On August 14, 1943, she received the Ursuline habit and the name Sister Virginia Mary.
In the summer of 1945, Sister learned that she had a large inoperable tumor on the spine, thought to be cancerous. In August, she made temporary vows with her classmates but her recovery seemed hopeless. Doctors later labeled her disease as neurofribromatosis, a rare disorder characterized by the development of benign tumors. She remained under the care of physicians for the remainder of her life and underwent surgery at various intervals for removal of tumors throughout her body. Despite poor health, Sister was seldom on sick leave other than when recuperating from surgery. In 1946, one year after the disease was discovered, she was assigned to open and operate a kindergarten at Immaculate Conception School, Earlington, Ky. (She felt she could “go on a mission”). She loved it, and stayed there eight years. After a year off for surgery to remove the tumor on the spine, she spent the next 19 years teaching in Ursuline-staffed schools. In Kentucky she taught at Lyndon and Hawesville. She also taught in Hillsboro, Mo., and in Farmington, N.M. In 1975, Sister resigned from classroom teaching to serve in pastoral ministry in parishes including Campbellsville, Ky.; Popular Bluff, Mo.; Edmond, Okla., and Greenville, Ky. In 1992, she retired to the Motherhouse and published the Mount Saint Joseph Newsletter, and created greeting cards and wall calendars using the unique photographs she had taken.
After Christmas 1998, she was taken to the hospital in Owensboro for surgery. She died Sunday morning January 10, 1999. The wake service was held Tuesday evening, January 12 in the Motherhouse chapel. Father Richard White, CMF, celebrated the funeral Mass on Wednesday morning January 13, 1999. Sister’s remains are buried in the convent cemetery.